It was at Radcliffe that Keller wrote her first autobiography, Story of My Life. History reported Keller was accepted to the prestigious Radcliffe College in Cambridge, which she attended with Sullivan by her side. There, she learned arithmetic and French.

Keller's parents allowed Sullivan to bring Helen to Boston and attend Perkins.

Their relationship was celebrated in the play and film The Miracle Worker. Sullivan became Keller's long-time companion. She also expressed an intention to learn to speak. She started mastering spelling the words in her hands but also learned braille - letters expressed as raised dots on the page. According to the American Foundation for the Blind, Keller first confused several words, but by April had learned 30 words. Anne began teaching Helen words by spelling these out on her hand. She arrived at Tuscumbia in March 1887, a day Keller would later call her 'soul's birthday.' Sullivan found Keller wild but curious. Sullivan was nearly blind herself because of eye disease. This changed when her mother read about the education of another deaf-blind girl, Laura Bridgman. The Keller family approached a doctor who referred them to Alexander Graham Bell - yes, the inventor of the telephone, who later became a friend of Keller. She frequently threw tantrums so severe that some family members felt she should be institutionalized. But she got impatient when she couldn't join conversations. She developed a sort of sign language with the daughter of a family cook. This sickness robbed her of the ability to hear and see.Īs she grew up, she tried to find any means of communication with her family. But at 19 months, she got sick with what doctors called 'brain fever,' though the Perkins School for the Blind suggests Keller may have contracted scarlet fever or meningitis. By the time she was six months old, she was speaking. But later on, her father took a job as editor of a weekly newspaper.

She didn't grow up in wealth, as her family took their income from a cotton plantation. Her father, said Biography, served as an officer in the Confederate army. Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to Arthur and Katherine Adams Keller.

The life of helen keller story